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Hoping for some objectivity
NavinJohnson
Member Posts: 60
I am considering playing this game, and I have been reading through the forums trying to get a feel for what is to come. Now, I understand that unhappy people tend to talk more than the happy ones, so I am hoping for some objectivity here; and hoping to hear from both sides.
However, let me just say up front, I am not without my biases. First off, I am not a big fan of Trion. I stopped playing Rift shortly after starting it because it just seemed like I was dealing with a constant stream of technical and vexing bugs and the questing content was dull and overly linear. And in fact, I'm not off to a great start again either, because I can't even get Glyph to unpack itself (and yes, i have seen the troubleshoots and have worked through them all save disabling my firewall, which I absolutely, positively will NOT do).
That being said, I have a couple of friends who love this game, so I'm willing to try and keep an open mind here.
From what I have seen here in these forums, it boils down to this:
(1) The game doesn't really start until current end-game when pvp and stealing stuff from people becomes the focus.
(2) You can build your own ship and become a pirate.
(3) Crafting is time-intensive, but deeper and more interesting than many games.
(4) The quest content is not very exciting or interesting.
(5) The pvp is good.
(6) The muli-classing and character customization designs are excellent.
(7) Gold farmers galore within chat.
(8) Trion is still the same Trion. Expect many problems that will eventually get resolved, but probably not very quickly.
(9) The game can be expensive if you wish to enjoy all the features.
In any case, I'm hoping for objectivity, both your good and bad thoughts about it. I'm going to see if i can get a solution for the Glyph issue so I can try it for myself, but before I go through all that (especially given my previous experience with Trion), I would love to have a better feel for what this game is really like.
Thanks very much for your help 
P.S. In speaking to the Glyph issue, I am able to Download and play SOE and Turbine games just fine. This is a Trion problem (just wanted to address this objection or concern before it came up....).
Comments
(1) The game doesn't really start until current end-game when pvp and stealing stuff from people becomes the focus.
Disagree. I have been having a blast since joining. The game opened up for me @ level 14 when I got a farm plot (8x8) and began trading and harvesting... With pve becoming a time distraction. Opens up a lot earlier than "end-game".
(2) You can build your own ship and become a pirate.
Yes. However, a pirates life is hard. No guild, few whispers, all hate and rage. Still it is possible.
(3) Crafting is time-intensive, but deeper and more interesting than many games.
Yep. Takes a lot of time. It's really a sort of game in and of itself. Way deeper. Way more meaningful than any other game imo.
(4) The quest content is not very exciting or interesting.
Oh dear god please don't try to level to 50 by questing. It's horrid. Like worse than horrid. Like stab me in the eyes bad.
(5) The pvp is good.
If you're winning pvp is always good. If you get pwn'd pvp sucks. Been that way in all games forever since the beginning of time.
(6) The muli-classing and character customization designs are excellent.
And yet somehow, we all look strangely familiar.
(7) Gold farmers galore within chat.
Much less since the latest patch. Now it's more the botters / teleporters.
(8) Trion is still the same Trion. Expect many problems that will eventually get resolved, but probably not very quickly.
This is my first experience with Trion. So far though, they are overworked to the gills. You will experience some problems, glitches, land issues, hacks, and other irritations. None of them destroy the game outright, they just severely hamper portions of the game.
(9) The game can be expensive if you wish to enjoy all the features.
This is completely subjective and based on each individuals own pocketbook. A brand new Toyota Tundra is expensive to me, to others it's darn cheap for what you get.
You can really make this game whatever you want. There is a guy in my guild that just farms in a bikini and never does quests or PvP. You can build a boat and go "relocate" other people's goods. There are many elements similar to more popular MMOs: PvP arenas, dungeons, world bosses and gold farming, but offers so much more that other games do not. If anything, this game is worth a try.
I cant speak to your Glyph issues as I have not had any but I can relate a bit of my experience in the game.
I have not run into any technical issues, botters or hackers on my server but I mostly hang with my guildies and do group activities like trade runs, farming or fishing trips.
Trion may not have made the game but their support is horrendous. I lost $40 to them on 9/27 and put in a ticket that I never got my credits and I still have yet to get a human reply. In fact, after 1 week they sent me an auto message asking me if I still needed support! I had to reply to keep my ticket open. What?!
In short the game for the most part is great, support for the game sucks bad in all areas.
Don't get too excited about 120 class combos, the majority suck and it is obvious that there are fotm cookie cutter builds you either use or suck. And right now just change the name of the game to Archerage, because 50% of the people playing are archers. Why? Because you can drop every other class, including mage ranged dps, without even being hit. They have greater range than any class in the game, more mobility, defense, and equal dps because no cast times.....no reason to not play one right now. I expect the nerf bat to knock them into oblivion at some point so roll at your own risk.
The pvp is okay, the problem I see is there is a crapload of cc. Esp 1v1 whoever gets Cc off first typically wins it seems. Being locked up until death is common.
The worst part of the game right now for me is the Hasla weapons grind. Everyone in the game gets stuck in the same small area of one zone to farm the same mobs for these stupid token. There is a different token for each weapon, you need to collect 150 of each particular token for the weapon you want. This is for the weakest tier. It is a pathetic and mindless grind that basically pisses all over the rest of what is an awesome game.
I am still active with AA, but I don't see it as my main mmo. AA does require a lot of time to actually see a investment on what your trying to achieve in the game. The game itself is huge on micromanagement and guild participation.
It other words, it won't appeal to the masses, but if you like crafting, claiming and conquering as the game says in load up, well you have found your game.
Your concerns about support and customer service are at the heart of my own reservations. I had a terrible experience with Rift, and right out of the gate, am having issues with Glyph.
Now, to be fair, plenty of people have said they haven't had any problems unpacking Glyph and getting the game up and running. If I had been able to do this, I wouldn't have needed this post. I could tried the game out and acquired the information for myself.
Still, based on what is coming back from the helpful replies here, not sure this game will be for me. PVP and Crafting are fun, and I enjoy them, but they are not at the center of what I'm looking for in a game, and in any case, I am just not willing to wrestle with Trion customer service again.
Thank you all for your comments
(5) The pvp is good.
This is highly subjective. A lot of the pvp is Zerg vs Zerg that performs very poorly in large scale battles. There is no CC duration reduction so CC can be stacked and players easily stun-locked until death. This makes it very easy for the bigger zerg to pretty much always win because as long as the players can press tab and use a CC skill they will be able to lock more people down and basically outgun the smaller side.
(6) The muli-classing and character customization designs are excellent.
There are 120 possible classes, but about 110 of them suck. The optimal builds have been figured out for a long time and the gear and weapons you choose have a large impact on what trees are viable. For example if you pick a healing tree, but don't have a healing weapon your skills will be useless.
It pretty much goes like this:
Tank: abolisher, hexblade, Skullknight
Meele DPS: dark runner, shadowblade
Archer: Primeval, Trickster, Stone Arrow
Mage: Daggerspell, Defiler, Demonologist
Healer: Templar, Cleric, Caretaker
(9) The game can be expensive if you wish to enjoy all the features.
If you want to get BiS gear sometime in the next year, you will need to buy loads of labor pots and use them on multiple characters.
I think this point is frequently overstated, largely because you can pick nearly all your abilities from 2 of your 3 pools, making the 3rd pool pretty much irrelevant.
eg, ANY build with Archery + Shadowplay, and ANY build with battlerage + defense and ANY build with sorcery + occultism can be made viable just by targeting the two primary pools.
Also, keep in mind, that the crafting game is gated by 3 significant factors:
- You MUST have land for a farm/house/other stuff or you can NOT craft. And since right now there is practically no land to get that you can get a farm/house down on, good luck with that. This is a bad design. (And I don't care if blah blah blah "In a month or 2 land will become available..." as is often said by defenders of this game, right now, you can't get any.)
- Labor points suck, when you run out, you are done crafting for the day. Unless of course, you run to the cash shop to buy LP potions. Again, bad design. Even if you are paying a VIP sub. Yeah, insulting.
- Crafting is an INSANE grind, both in time and money, and a funnel into the cash shop, again. If you sit down and do the math on the amount of time and materials required to get beyond a certain point, you will literally give up on trying to do the higher end crafting. (The hasla is not terrible, but for the stuff you need from chests? Silly, stupid, insane grind,) This kind of thing might fly in Asia, but it is really over the top for Western players.
And I crafted a lot in both SWG and EvE, so I have played some crafting.
I have no idea why people complains about Hasla grind. It is probably one of the easiest grind that I've done - form a raid, make sure there are no one rolling for the same token as you, and just do it for about an hour or so a day.
You could probably get your T1 Hasla weap in about a week.
That's a non-grind compare the crap I have to go through with the pvp gear grind in WoW Vanilla or SWTOR's battlemaster gear when SWTOR first launches (that RNG on opening those PVP gear containers was just plain annoying, considering that you have to grind enough pvp tokens to even got a chance to buy that container. It was a double grind with RNG).
Well, so much for objectivity
@op: crafting and collecting are said to be better ways to level. If you like crafting and collecting then that works. If you dont' then the quests are pretty much the same but if you have played any games with collect/kill/visit X quests and you don't mind them then it's not a big deal.
I hate crafting in most games as most of the time "crafting" is really about "collecting bits and pressing a button".
Now, having said that, it seems there is a decent amount of bits to collect and what I find a shame is that you might want to craft something but you will see you need "x" part/bit/item etc and you have no idea what it is.
I personally think that is the first step to a bad crafting system as it's ass backwards. One should find things and experiment and as you go you will know where things are, how to get them and what they do. As opposed to "what? I need what? I've never even seen that in game" and then you have to run to forums and use google and ask in chat (if you can stand that) etc. That might be subjective but that is my reasoning so you can measure your reaction from that.
In any case, I've been leveling solely by the quests and haven't clawed my eyes out yet. Even grouped up a bit which was fun.
Honestly? Try the game as a free to play and if you like it pay the sub.
And the game "starts" at the moment you are enjoying yourself. If you can find enjoyment at levle 10 then great. If you want to get away from the linear questing part then just craft and collect. Once you are high enough you will sell items, pvp, (make sure you join a guild) and start experiencing the game's broader game play.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Aim for the title of "Asshat", that's what the rest do (Their king will pipe up shortly yo explain).
No trials. No tricks. No traps. No EU-RP server. NO THANKS!
...10% Benevolence, 90% Arrogance in my case!
I agree that if you don't bother people with a bunch of questions the crafting system makes no sense. If you are soloing and just questing you will not have any idea about crafting or really anything in the game. The "tutorial" isn't very good although very long. So crafting that you can't really do without land, which you won't have, and you will have no idea how to do it unless you bother people.
I will say you are the first person I've seen say that the questing part of the game is fun. The bad thing is that leveling slows down quite a bit around lvl 20, if you are questing. It feels worse than an EQ hell level as the pve is the worst I've ever seen. Mobs don't really drop loot. They drop some coins and occasionally a piece of armor that you likely won't be able to use. I can't stress how bad the PvE is.
Also if you like Darkfall or even GW2 type combat don't come into this game expecting anything like that. This is root yourself to the ground tab target combat with no dodge. People that want skillful combat only will go nuts with this. I think it is extremely dull combat but the build possibilities and the abilities themselves are powerful and interesting.
I am enjoying the seamless open world and potential for fun after the soul crushing linear themepark "tutorial". It is an interesting game in that the northern continent that will be opening up with sieging and castles/territory control, which could be fun. Unfortunately, there are no real consequences for dying so zerging will always win. I have no idea how they are going to do open world castle sieging with no consequences for dying (loot loss etc).
Ultimately if you don't really care about PvE and are a highly social PvP/Crafting person, I think there may be some fun to be had. It is odd for someone whose favorite MMO's are EQ1 and Darkfall. Two extremes of the genre that do their sides of the genre so much better than this halfway attempt at both (although I don't think they are trying to have any meaningful PvE as PvP based Darkfall has much better PvE than this).
I still think the best place to find out how a new release is progressing is through the games General Official Forum.
You can ask all you want here, but the white knights and the haters will not have a good objective discussion. Quote from Tommy Boy "I can get a good look at a T-bone by sticking my head up a bull's ass, but I'd rather take a butcher's word for it."
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Actually, two things.
I never said the pve was "fun" I said the grouping "while" doing the pve was fun.
However, the second thing is that I'm an old Lineage 2 player. An "actual" Korean grinder even though some people (who can't possibly imagine a worse grind) would say such games as Aion have a grind.
So the leveling in Archeage by questing or even grinding between quests, for me, is child's play. Especially when I have years worth of experience in a game where, at higher levels, one can spend half a year leveling and "not" level once.
Yet I'm in my 30's in Archeage after it was recently launched.
There is not a grind in Archeage that can phase me. So, while I wouldn't categorize it as "fun" I wouldn't say it's "not fun".
It's what you do to level when you don't want to craft or gather.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
ArcheAge
It's free to play so you can go try it yourself.
I love the idea of sandbox pvp, with gliders, open ocean with boats, the cool mounts, housing and farming, castle sieges, just look at this trailer video.
But...
They have a pay-to-win cash shop and the facebook paygate labor system that ruin any chance of me having fun in this game.
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/My short and sweet opinion:
The questing is really, really boring, especially between 40-50. The overachieve helps a little, but not much.
However, I love the rest of the game so much that I simply do not care. And there is PLENTY to look forward to in upcoming patches.
He may be use to playing an action mmorpg like GW2, WS, or Tera where fighting has another element. After playing GW2 for a while and then playing WoW I feel like I'm playing flat footed. This happens especially when fighting mobs because the need to jump or move out of the way is less necessary with those kind of games.
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
I have two of them on the same character, a bow and a staff. It took me less than 5 hours of grinding to get both. Mind you, these are tier 1, but it takes maybe 2 hours to get one of them if you have a decent spot and group. With a group of 3-4 I got my bow in 2 hours. It's really not that bad.
@OP: The crafting isn't bad, although the RNG aspect of it might be a turn-off to some. It requires a large investment of time and gold to progress it to a point where you can make the stuff that you'll actually want.
The questing truly is awful. It's linear and boring and gets worse at certain stages, i.e. at 30 it becomes much more of a grind and at 40 it becomes unbearable. I love the game. I've leveled 4 characters to 50 from the Alpha until now, and I've never gotten the last 3-5 levels from anything other than labor. I can't bring myself to quest for them. That said, spending labor can net you a ton of exp, and for a patron it isn't difficult to save it up.
The PvP is very good in my opinion. Zergs can be annoying, and they do happen from time to time but my experience has mostly been small group skirmishes and the gladiator arena. My only gripe with the PvP is that currently it seems like everyone has a hasla weapon which is outrageously strong compared the the armor sets that they have. Nearly everyone is a glass cannon currently which makes 1v1's end very quickly and doesn't allow much wiggle room for mistakes or clutch moments. This will change as crafted sets become more commonplace and when Auroria is opened, allowing for those sets to be obtained.
As far as class customization goes, it does allow for a lot of creativity and personalization. It's true that many make the same builds as others but by no means are they the only viable classes in the game. There are many lesser known/played classes that are extremely viable and this will increase even further when level 55 is unlocked and those skill/skill points become available. A lot of builds that previously weren't viable will become viable when that happens.
As for the game being potentially expensive, that's only if you choose to play it that way. It's not even remotely necessary to spend anything beyond the price of patron status, which you can purchase with in-game gold thanks to APEX. You'll only feel the need to spam labor potions if you're crafting all your labor away as soon as you get it. If you only use your labor for farming/fishing/tradepacks etc. you'll have plenty of it, assuming you're a patron. I woul NOT recommend playing without patron status for long.
Anything done over and over again can get boring but if you mix it up with crafting, farming, trading and PVP then questing is just another way to level skills, get coin purses and armor/weapons to deconstruct for archeum.
Crafting and farming in this game can be just as boring, if not more so, than questing. I have a level 50 who is leveling his 4th through 6th skill lines by farming, crafting and trade runs mostly-- I can only do so much of that. But I have an alt who is leveling questing, doing instances, mining, PVPing and dailies for gilda... when I get bored with one I just jump on the other one.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
All this is true. AA certainly is not a 30-60 min every few nights casual drop in game. It won't be for everybody.
But watch out for these forums OP... Many here confuse cynicism and negativity for 'objectivity' and think anything else is 'rose coloured glasses' or whatever. This is a place where usually only negativity is treated as being valid.